With Massachusetts and Mississippi gone, you could award a blue ribbon to Alaska and Washington for taking out the Polar Opposites prize. Jed figured that Washington, with its much larger population and resource base, would resist Alaska having a virtual veto over any measures necessary to act within a constitutional framework. And Alaska, for its part, might well see itself as the last bastion of rugged individualism, and so would have limited interest in submitting to a drastically revised federal system highly tilted toward nanny-statism.
It was going to be worse than the First and Second Continental Congress, that was for certain. It was going to make the argument over issues like the Article of Confederation and how much of a person a slave represented look like a middle-school debate class. There wasn’t any George Washington around to hold the delegates together or come up with the various compromises they’d need. Any constitutional convention with the three remaining players was going to be a first-class WWE smackdown cage match.
Culver sighed, already exhausted at the prospect of tying all this together into a neat package with a bright bow that everyone would want to own. He returned to his keyboard for one last sentence for Ritchie’s benefit.
The trick to making this work will be to cram all the wild cats into the bag before they know what’s happening.
The key, he thought to himself, is George Washington. If a modern George Dubya didn’t exist, Jed Culver was going to have to invent him.
29
PACOM HQ, PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII
He was an operator, possibly a crook, and definitely not to be left alone with the small-change jar. But Admiral James Ritchie couldn’t help but warm to Culver the more time he spent with him. There was no reason they should get on, a patrician New Englander from old money with a long family history of noblesse oblige, and a scheming carpetbagger from the bad end of the bayou. Certainly, naпvetй didn’t come into it. Thanks to Colonel Maccomb of the 500th Military Intelligence Brigade, Ritchie was well aware of what kind of a creature Jed Culver was. A fixer.
He was the operator your troubled multi-billion-dollar company called in to quickly and quietly clean up the mess left behind by your recently departed and grotesquely incompetent CEO. He was the man who procured the difficult export licence in the hopelessly corrupt, but fabulously oil-rich, third-world shithole. Or the development approval for your six-star resort on the ecologically fragile tropical island. Or the seemingly impossible negotiated truce between the warring Stone Age tribes that was interfering with the profit margins of your hardwood logging operations in the New Guinea highlands. If that didn’t work, he hired the heavy hitters who protected your oil-drilling operations in Africa without cutting too deep into your budget.
Jed Culver was a rolled-gold son of a bitch.
That said, Ritchie had a gut feeling that when the big questions were asked, this gladhanding sack of shit would actually give you a straight answer, especially if that answer was something you didn’t want to hear. Perhaps he was a bit like old Joe Kennedy in that way. Ritchie, an avid reader of historical biographies, thought he recognised something in Culver that FDR might have seen in the old bootlegger when appointing him to head up the SEC way back in the Depression – a thief you could trust.
The admiral kept all these thoughts to himself, of course, as Culver walked around his office speaking from notes, with his expensive jacket off, shirt sleeves rolled up and tie raffishly askew. Was the ruffled, big-doofus thing just part of his routine? Probably. With a guy like Culver you had to figure that everything was part of the routine. But still, he seemed blessed, if that was the right word, with a frightening appreciation for the worst aspects of human nature, and how they might still be turned to everyone’s advantage.
‘The only intact chain of command we have left,’ the lawyer said, in his soft Southern brogue, ‘is, of course, your own. But by constitutional tradition, your entire chain remains subordinate to civilian rule and, let me just check-back you, ladies and gentlemen…’ Culver looked up from his notes and smiled at the small group of military officers in the room. ‘Y’all ain’t planning a coup d’йtat, are you?’
From anyone else, it would have been a dangerous gamble, an insult to people who had pledged their lives to defending the Constitution. But Jed Culver had a way of smiling and somehow twinkling his eyes that added an unspoken Naw, of course you ain’t - you’re good ol’ boys and gals. The best.
Ritchie even noticed a smile attempting to creep around the corners of the deeply fissured face of Lieutenant General Murphy, Commander, US Army Pacific, and the senior army officer on the islands. But, for professional reasons, Murphy had long ago banned any semblance of a sunny disposition from his person, and he managed now to crush the small grin stone dead. It had no discernible effect on Culver, who carried on.
‘Fact is though, folks, given the scale of disaster we face, precise legality will have to give way almost immediately to practicality. As the esteemed Justice Jackson pointed out in Terminiello v. Chicago, the Constitution is not a goddamn suicide pact. If we are going to survive, we need good government, and quick. And given that nobody is much interested in fashioning a military dictatorship out of the ashes of the old Republic, I would suggest that for practical purposes it will initially resemble a patchwork of small-and big-town mayors, the surviving political and administrative leadership, law enforcement, and perhaps-no, definitely - some religious and community leaders with a large following. Whatever government comes into being out of this nightmare has to arise from the ground up, rather than be imposed from above.’
‘Fine words, Mr Culver,’ rumbled Murphy. ‘Brings a tear to the eye. But we’re in deep shit and we need to dig ourselves out of it, muy pronto. Adapt, overcome and drive on.’
There were nine military officers in the room. The commander of the army’s 25th Infantry Division and the senior Marine nodded in agreement with Murphy’s brusque comment. Again, however, Ritchie watched with sneaking admiration as the lawyer let the rebuke wash over him, even turning it around.
‘Damn straight,’ said Culver. ‘We need this done yesterday. Hell, we needed it as soon as that energy thing crashed down on top of us. But we have to accept that as scared and fucked up as people are right now, especially those poor bastards who are close enough to the Wave to be able to see it, they will adapt. There will come a day when it’s not the first thing they think of when they wake up in the morning. And they will go back to the old ways of doing things, of each against the other and damn anyone in between. It’s just our nature. So whatever we set up now has to have the elegance of our first constitutional principles. It has to allow for the better angels of our nature to sing, because, Lord knows, the demons are going to be a massed fucking choir over the next little while.’